A Century of South African Theatre

Loren Kruger

• Éditeur: Methuen Drama
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350008021
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Literary Criticism in Drama

"Theatre is not part of our vocabulary": Sipho Sepamla's provocation in 1981, the year of famous anti-apartheid play Woza Albert!, prompts the response, yes indeed, it is. A Century of South African Theatre demonstrates the impact of theatre and other performances-pageants, concerts, sketches, workshops, and performance art-over the last hundred years. Its coverage includes African responses to pro-British pageants celebrating white Union in 1910, such as the Emancipation Centenary of the abolition of British colonial slavery in 1934 organized by Griffiths Motsieloa and HIE Dhlomo, through anti-apartheid testimonial theatre by Athol Fugard, Maishe Maponya, Gcina Mhlophe, and many others, right up to the present dramatization of state capture, inequality and state violence in today's unevenly democratic society, where government has promised much but delivered little. Building on Loren Kruger's personal observations of forty years as well as her published research, A Century of South African Theatre provides theoretical coordinates from institution to public sphere to syncretism in performance in order to highlight South Africa's changing engagement with the world from the days of Empire, through the apartheid era to the multi-lateral and multi-lingual networks of the 21st century. The final chapters use the Constitution's injunction to improve wellbeing as a prompt to examine the dramaturgy of new problems, especially AIDS and domestic violence, as well as the better known performances in and around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kruger critically evaluates internationally known theatre makers, including the signature collaborations between animator/designer William Kentridge, and Handspring Puppet Company, and highlights the local and transnational impact of major post-apartheid companies such as Magnet Theatre.

1

Commemorating and Contesting Emancipation

Pageants and Other Progressive Enactments

On Sunday June 3, 1934, an audience of African artists, American Board Missionaries, liberal whites in the Joint European/African Council movement, and “New Africans” (educated and to a degree Europeanized) gathered at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre (BMSC) in central Johannesburg for an Emancipation Centenary Celebration, commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. This celebration, subtitled a National Thanksgiving, was framed by speeches by American missionaries and leading New Africans, members of a small but influential class of clergymen, writers, teachers, and other professionals, such as R.V. Selope Thema, editor of Bantu World, and Dr. A.B. Xuma, physician and later ANC president. It included extracts from Handel’s Messiah, Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory, European, African, and American hymns, including “Negro spirituals,” and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered by Trinity College (London) graduate, Griffiths Motsieloa. This event, organized by Africans rather than the brown or Coloured descendants of enslaved people who had commemorated emancipation in the nineteenth century, culminated in a “dramatic display,” whose text, compiled from sources including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did not focus on the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1834 or the official end of unpaid servitude in 1838, but rather on the enslaved in the United States.¹ The evening concluded with Enoch Sontonga’s well-known hymn Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika [God Bless Africa] (1897).

Despite research on this event (Erlmann 1991; Kruger 1999a; Peterson 2000) and renewed interest after apartheid in the commemoration of emancipation, the Emancipation Centenary Celebration itself remains largely invisible. Nonetheless it deserves attention for linking aspirations of Africans at home and in the diaspora, and highlighting Africans’ syncretic repurposing of American emancipation discourse and, less obviously, challenges to the British Empire, as hinted in another hymn on the program, Reuben Caluza’s Silusapo or iLand Act (Caluza 1992), whose title alluded not only to the 1913 Land Act restricting African access to land but also to Sol Plaatje’s 1914 Native Life in South Africa, which was both a study of colonization and a petition for justice addressed to the British Crown. It also merits comparison with Mandela’s inauguration in 1994. The differences are obvious: the 1934 commemoration was staged by and for an educated but embattled minority conscious of their precarious hold on political rights, economic security, or happiness, while the 1994 inauguration ushered in South Africa’s first democratic government; the latter event was legally binding, the former only aspirational. And yet—while the millions who celebrated in 1994 were likely unaware of the modest event of 1934–these events have common elements. Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrica is now part of the composite national anthem and Mandela’s choice to call the inauguration the achievement of “our political emancipation” (1994: 4) acknowledged South Africans’ abiding interest in global as well as local struggles that began well before his birth. Reviewing these connections in 2018, the centenary of Mandela’s birth in 1918, highlights the unfinished project of emancipation, which in the terms of the South African constitution, calls for social well-being as well as political rights. The participants in 1934 were concerned about losing the franchise but those celebrating full enfranchisement in 1994 doubtless remembered the attempts to sabotage democracy by Afrikaner and Zulu nationalists barely months before the elections, as Mandela recalled—“we saw our country tear itself apart in violent conflict.” From the vantage point of 2018, after former president Zuma’s promises to bridge the widening inequality gap between the poor majority and the tiny rich minority were exposed as cover for corruption and impunity, the promises of 1994 seem likewise fragile, aspirational, subjunctive. The achievement of freedom for political assembly, housing, and the right to work are enshrined in the constitution but the executive disregard for these rights prompts vigilance as well as hope.

For the moment, the genealogy of performance and the productive friction of syncretic practices that link the Emancipation Celebration to the inauguration of 1994 call us to look at the 1934 response to the 1910 Pageant of Union, which unified British colonies and Boer republics at the expense of the black majority. While it commemorated emancipation, the Emancipation Centenary also reproached the Union for disenfranchising Africans and for the racialist ideology that shaped the Historical Pageant in 1910. This pageant, which began in Table Bay and continued before the Cape Town City Council, Parliament, and British dignitaries, employed five thousand performers. Borrowing its form from pageants staged in Canada and other British dominions (Merrington 1997), it depicted the European (Portuguese, Dutch, and British) “discovery” of the natives and the conquest of their lands but avoided the sensitive topic of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). By ending with the meeting between King Moshoeshoe I and President Hoffmann of the Orange Free State in 1854 before the discovery of diamonds in 1867, the pageant elided the coercion that forced Africans to work in the diamond and later gold mines, and instead reenacted the imperial teleology of the “Progress of Prosperity” over “hordes of ignorance, cruelty, savagery, unbelief, war, pestilence, famine and their ilk” (Historical Sketch 1910: 93), whereby Europe brought “civilization” to what G.W.F. Hegel called the “unhistorical, undeveloped Spirit of Africa” (1956: 99). Despite this presumption, the pageant acknowledged the historical role of some people of color. In addition to Moshoeshoe who was played by his son, the pageant featured an actor playing Sheik Yusuf, a Muslim cleric exiled by the VOC in 1696 and credited today with bringing Islam to the Cape. Yusuf was both slave-owner and anti-colonial rebel but the script identifies him merely as “a Javanese teacher” (Historical Sketch: 78). Although the pageant thus included a few black roles and mute “maidens in white” (94), the “historical heroes” (95) were white men (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Boer and Briton before Britannia in The Pageant of Union, Cape Town, May 1910.

Photograph: courtesy of the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town; artist unknown.

The Emancipation Celebration shared with the Union Pageant a homage to the value of European civilization, represented by the music of Handel and the Gettysburg Address but exposed the subordination of even elite Africans, who depended on liberal white patrons of their project. Even Africans who criticized the savagery of whites in Africa and who sought therefore to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty 1992: 20) by relativizing its claim to represent universal values used the language of the European enlightenment to defend universal human rights. The1934 script cast the participants as New Africans, as opposed to the “tribal” figures in the Union Pageant. By including Lincoln’s 1863 text and African Nationalist songs, the program pointed toward an as yet utopian democratic future. More concretely, the representation of New Africans in this modest event led to appearances at official events staged by whites, such as the Empire Exhibition (1936), as well as other events staged by Africans, such as “Africa—a revel pageant” (1940), “depicting the march of progress of the Bantu.” While New Africans could not operate on the scale of the Union, they could appropriate the forms of these enactments while borrowing other elements from African Americans to represent themselves as modern agents. Taking into account the precarious nature of New African aspirations between the prospect of emancipation by “European civilization” in the abstract and the actual constraints on African freedoms, this chapter investigates the ways in which the flexible formats of variety and the pageant created space for the representation and negotiation of these contradictions.

New Africans, New Negroes, and the Paradoxes of Neocolonial Modernity

This Emancipation Centenary Celebration negotiated multiple political meanings that may seem contradictory to present-day observers but which managed nonetheless to express critical opinions about the present as well as the past conditions of Africans. Written by noted Zulu writer R.R. [Rolfes] Dhlomo and directed by his brother H.I.E. [Herbert] Dhlomo, the “dramatic display” (Dhlomo et al. 1934) quoted the subtitle and several scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s depiction of what the novel’s subtitle called “The Life of the Lowly.” As suggested in Bantu World and Umteteli wa Bantu—newspapers edited and read by blacks even if funded by whites—“the suffering of the American Negroes on the slave market, in the cotton fields and at home, until the joyful news of the liberation” highlighted the pathos of enslaved people and their gratitude for the act of emancipation.² This pathos was modified, however, by the inclusion of such thoroughly modern songs as Sixotshwa emsebenzini [We are being fired (expelled from work)] by Reuben Caluza, Zulu composer, cousin to the Dhlomo brothers, and visiting fellow at Columbia University, New York (Erlmann 1991: 119–47). While white spectators may have missed the full import of the songs, Africans would have been familiar with this and others on the program such as iLand Act. For New African participants, the historical references to emancipation and the Land Act called up the immediate threat posed by the Hertzog Bills (named for J.B.M. Hertzog, Nationalist minister in the ruling United Party), which became law in 1936. The Native Representation Act abolished African rights to the general franchise in favor of voting only for white representatives, and the Native Trust and Land Act (Couzens 1985: 139) slightly revised the 1913 Act to put land in the reserves under the jurisdiction of compliant chiefs.

Caught in the contradiction between the European rhetoric of emancipation and the South African reality of segregation, New Africans, like the subjects of British India, had to negotiate what Shula Marks calls the “ambiguities of dependence” (1986: 54). Even if the white establishment that Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy calls the “intimate enemy” (1983) of native intellectuals betrayed these ideals, the ideals of liberal individualism offered them arguments to challenge segregationists. Selope Thema enjoined Bantu World readers to “honour the great emancipators” such as Lincoln who show the way to “rescue [the world] from the thralldom of nationalist and racial passions.”³ In pointing to racial discrimination despite formal freedoms, however, he drew on W.E.B. Du Bois, whose Souls of Black Folk (1903) vividly described the oppression of African Americans after emancipation (1989: 28–29). Selope Thema wrote “it is true that Natives can no longer be bought and sold … but they are still in bondage as a people and there is a determined stand by Europeans against the grant to them [sic] of that full liberty to which all men are entitled … Natives are not slaves, but they are not freemen.”⁴ Quoting Du Bois, his editorial challenged white segregationists with the example of African-American achievements. Although not themselves descendants of enslaved people, New Africans found in the progress of African Americans a crucial point of reference for criticizing the curtailment of civil rights for black South Africans. As teacher S.V. Mdhluli wrote, “the Negroes on the other side of the Atlantic have made gigantic progress; all the same we are making a steady advance to the same goal … They have shown … that this much debated ‘arrested development’ is practically unknown among the Negroes” (1933: 48–49). Like New Negro Alain Locke who challenged white society’s “sentimental interest” in black traditions and the “double standard” of the “philanthropic attitude” (1992: 8–10), New Africans were suspicious of whites whose concern for “Native” traditions masked indifference to black aspirations for citizenship. In this respect they joined Du Bois’s challenge to African conservatives who, like Booker T. Washington, supported separate development.⁵

While New Africans held on to the idea of universal rights, conservatives in the ANC, led by its president Pixley ka Seme and president of the Zulu-dominated Natal branch John Dube, saw in the state’s program of separate development an opportunity for maintaining African autonomy through what Ali Mazrui calls re-traditionalization.⁶ Just as tradition has less to do with the “persistence of old forms” than with the “ways in which form and value are linked together” (Erlmann 1991: 10), re-traditionalization implies not a return to pre-modern custom but instead a re-appropriation of customary practices for present purposes. This project aimed to consolidate the limited power of the chiefs eroded by the migration of peasants to the cities; they welcomed laws such as the amended Land Act that allotted land in the reserves to be supervised by themselves.⁷ Unlike “neo-traditionalism,” a de-historicized view of tradition as timeless and immune to present politics, re-traditionalization appropriated aspects of modernity, such as vernacular literacy and the refashioning of precolonial remains into national heritage, so as to reinvent loose clan affiliation as obligatory respect for traditional authority within the confines of the white state.

New Africans by contrast held to the belief that modern citizenship would ultimately outweigh the disruption of traditional authority. Selope Thema defended African appropriation of elements of European civilization, such as literacy and individual rights, and, while acknowledging the value of precolonial communal organization, lambasted tribal custom as the weight of the “dead … on the living.”⁸ Profoundly suspicious of European interests in “development along the Native’s own lines,” New Africans such as the Dhlomo brothers did not, however, abandon tradition. Rather, by participating in networks established by mission schools such as Lovedale (founded 1832), Amanzimtoti—later Adams—College (1855), and Marianhill (1884), as well as cultural institutions such as the Gamma Sigma debating societies (1918), the BMSC (1924) or the Eisteddfodau (1931)—festivals of song and dramatic sketches based on British versions of the Welsh original—they hoped to enrich African culture. The mission school syllabus, which supplemented Shakespeare and the European musical repertoire with imperial writers such as Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan, provided material for New Africans but they drew also on African-American sources. The abolitionist melodrama and “Negro spirituals” in the Emancipation Centenary program competed with vaudeville, ragtime, jazz, and local marabi music, which reached a wider audience in the dance halls frequented by growing numbers of plebeian abaphakathi (the people in between, neither fully assimilated nor fully at home with indigenous custom).

New African admiration for the New Negro elite made them ambivalent towards plebeian culture, but they acknowledged that the appeal of black popular music flowed in part from African-American assertions of pan-African affiliation and in part from local marabi music’s pan-ethnic appeal to urbanizing Africans.⁹ The influence of black American music could be traced from Orpheus MacAdoo’s Virginia Jubilee Singers touring in the 1890s to local minstrel groups such as the African Darkies who borrowed coon songs and skits from imported recordings and sheet music (Coplan 2008: 148).¹⁰ By the 1930s, some local bands had become polished troupes such as the Darktown Strutters, whose repertoire mixed jazz, ragtime, and comic sketches with jubilee and amakwaya [choir] music favored by mission-educated blacks (Erlmann 1991: 60). Women’s groups, though less common, were also popular and, as names such as Emily Makanana’s Dangerous Blues imply, did not limit their repertoire to “respectable” music. New African negotiation of these African-American currents was well underway by the 1930s and was more independent than the later Sophiatown scene, even if the latter may be better known thanks to the photographic record of Jürgen Schadeberg, Bob Gosani, and others in Drum magazine. New Africans in the 1930s still had some control over the means of their production—thanks to exemptions to the pass laws for educated Africans—which allowed the relative autonomy of impresarios such as Motsieloa, which would become impossible in the 1950s, when African impresarios were losing ground to European managers and apartheid law. If African modernity merits comparison to the Harlem Renaissance, we should explore the New African dawn, however, darkened by neocolonial clouds, before the twilight of Sophiatown (Chapter 3).

New African exploration of African, American, and European cultural flows involved passionate but variable appropriations of English culture, popular entertainments, and indigenous traditions, as they knew that entertainment coul...